Project Planning Project Structures The central structures in project management are work breakdown structures (WBS) and

networks, with their attendant activities and milestones.

Project Builder and Project Planning Board The project builder is the central tool used for setting up and monitoring projects and integrates all the application-specific functions that are required in a user-friendly working environment. The project planning board is a graphical tool that simplifies project planning, combining tabular and graphical data to provide a global overview.

Resource Planning/Workforce Planning Defines a project team by assigning a project organization, capacity planning for activities via work centers, and planning the workforce on an individual level.

Documents Project management is fully integrated into the document management system of SAP PLM Life-Cycle Data Management. Assigning documents is supported by all DMS functions (that is, versioning and vaulting). You can view the originals of assigned document masters and maintain them directly in the project builder. You can search for project documents using various search engines and publish them for external access on the Internet.

Costs You can plan costs using easy cost planning or by making use of the network calculation of internal and external work, services, and procurement planned in activities that are automatically calculated.

Revenues The billing plan is either automatically updated by the sales order or planned manually in the project and includes dates on which payment requests or invoices affecting sales are sent to customers. Dates and milestone progress can be used to trigger the billing procedure. You can also benefit from resource-related sales pricing/billing.

Budget Budget availability controls all expenditures during the execution phase. Additionally, the original budget can be broken down into smaller packages of released budgets to allow an even more accurate availability control.

Scheduling Functions Scheduling is carried out forwards and backwards according to the relationships between activities. Constraints are taken into account, earliest and latest dates are calculated, and floats are determined. To fully utilize this functionality, the following products should be evaluated

 SAP ERP Project Execution Confirmation Enables you to confirm actual time and costs for your project. The times you enter become the actual times and costs for the project. Full change and cancellation handling are also provided.

Project-Oriented Procurement/Production Using the assignment of material components to network activities, you determine the assemblies and raw materials that must be reserved or ordered for a project and trigger procurement using MRP or purchasing. You can assign bills of material using the BOM-PS interface.

Claim Management Processes any project-relevant information such as variances or claims from third parties.

Payments During execution, payment of relevant postings -- through integration of other SAP solutions -- feeds project cash management and provides the most accurate information possible on incoming and outgoing payments.

Project Progress Progress analysis/earned value analysis is the tool to determine planned and actual project progress values. It obtains information on the state of

projects and how they are developing. Milestone trend analysis displays the dates of the relevant milestones in a project at different report dates.

Progress Tracking Enables you to closely monitor the progress of network components in the project system and purchase orders in materials management.

ProMan Consolidates procurement process information from a variety of applications in a structured and individual overview, which can be configured by the user. You have access to data from the project system, purchasing, material requirements planning, production, and inventory management.

Project Information System Is a flexible, comprehensive information system you can use to monitor and control your project data. You can evaluate individual projects, partial projects, or multiple projects. Includes overview reports and reports offering various degrees of detail. Is designed to meet the needs of both project management and ordinary project personnel. Predefined InfoCubes are available for the SAP Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW). To fully utilize this functionality, the following products should be evaluated SAP ERP Interfaces

Open Project System Is a suite for modern communication between the SAP Project System and other project management systems and personal organizers. In the first stage of this development, it is possible to exchange data with Microsoft Project and Palm Pilot.

Collaborative Project Management cProjects enables the realization of innovative ideas in development projects, simplifies internal processes, and supports methodologies, such as QS9000 or Stage Gate. In cProjects, object links are used to link existing project management objects to project elements. Using object links, it is possible to display the data of project management objects (such as costs, budget, dates, WBS element master data, activities, and so on) in the cProjects application and include this data in cProjects evaluations.

Balanced Scorecard When it comes to strategic management, instruments like the Balanced Scorecard (a tool within SAP Strategic Enterprise Management) are often used to visualize the situation of an organization. With this integration, it is possible to create projects or WBS elements directly in the Balanced Scorecard and link them to strategic initiatives set up to change the situation of the organization. Dates and key financial figures can be monitored directly within the Balanced Scorecard. To fully utilize this functionality, the following products should be evaluated SAP ERP Program Management

Product Portfolio Management Making decisions about the current product portfolio is the key to ensuring the future success of an organization. One instrument for comparing products and deriving strategic decisions is portfolio analysis. By displaying products three-dimensionally (x and y axis + size of bubble), you can quickly grasp the situation at hand. Popular dimensions for portfolio analysis are, for example, market growth, market share, sales volume or technology attractiveness, economic success probability, and sales volume.

Evaluating Strategic Product Developments Strategic program management provides you with a comprehensive planning scenario that enables you to evaluate your existing product portfolio and make crucial decisions, for example, whether to discontinue a product, implement a new product, or intensify production.

Scenario Simulation When decision-relevant factors from outside the organization (market, prices, and so on) or inside the organization (costs, capacities, and so on) change, the products mix may have to be rearranged (intensified, removed, and so on). To react quickly to these trends, managers need the necessary information available anytime and anywhere.

Life-Cycle Planning Life-cycle cost and revenue planning allows you to plan the product life cycle in a series of steps that can also be integrated into existing planning applications. The planning scenario is built within SAP

Strategic Enterprise Management (SAP SEM). The result of all these calculations is the product cash flow.

Life-Cycle Costing Actuals Point of sales data (profitability analysis as the main source of data) delivers product-specific sales and costing data. This data is combined with data from product-specific investment (assets) and development (projects). Making use of the most up-to-date technology, reporting takes place in SAP Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW). The resulting report shows the product cash flow and contains all necessary data for the complete life cycle of a product. To fully utilize this functionality, the following products should be evaluated SAP ERP Design Collaboration cFolders Web-based collaboration platform enables users to work on design and development projects in virtual teams within cross-enterprise processes.

Hierarchical Structuring You can collect and structure product and project information in a logical collaboration-based framework. You can organize and locate information quickly and easily with the ability to create folders in any hierarchical sequence you wish.

Authorization Concept

The object-oriented authorization concept is optimized for work in dynamic project teams.

Document Versions A wide variety of objects/documents can be assigned to any folder, including Office documents or CAD drawings. The version control mechanism ensures that all collaboration partners can track the change history of a document.

Document Handling Direct editing of all file types supported by a front-end PC. Checked-out documents are stored in the list of favorites. Documents are locked during check-in/check-out.

Back-End Integration Documents, materials, and BOMs can be exchanged between cFolders and the back-end system (SAP ERP). External users without an SAP System can maintain or create material BOMs (only a browser is required).

Notifications The notification function can be used to be alerted of any changes that are made to documents or subfolders within a collaboration. Additionally, other team members can be actively notified of any tasks they have to work on by e-mail or by notifications within cFolders.

Meetings/WebEx Integration If sharing information synchronously is relevant, PLM offers the integration of WebEx to help customers work on collaboration projects in real time over the Web. Users can access the meeting functions from the cFolders interface and organize or track these meetings within their cFolders meeting inbox.

Redlining/Markup The integrated ECL viewing capabilities allow the markup/redlining of 2D and 3D drawings.

Data Sheet Handling Specifications often require that quantifiable characteristics related to products are provided. Data sheets simplify this process by allowing you to import your classification system to structure the characteristic values you want to provide in a bidding process. Comparison of data sheets between vendors is simplified by presenting an overview of all data in Excel.

Work Areas/Competitive Scenarios Separate supplier work areas can be created with individual authorization settings for managing information exchange during the competitive bidding procurement process. Integration with the SRM Bidding Engine will be based on the cFolders competitive scenario (availability of integration Q2/2003).

Status Management Allows project managers to set up an easy-to-handle process control on the fly. A status profile consists of freely definable statuses and the transitions between them. A status profile can be assigned to documents, data sheets, materials, BOMs, folders, areas, and collaborations.

Distributed Content Server Support The use of distributed content servers is supported. Users can choose the closest content server to decrease network traffic and improve speed of access.

Large File Handling FTP connectivity is supported for users with a low bandwidth Internet connection. To fully utilize this functionality, the following products should be evaluated SAP ERP Collaborative Project Management cProjects Supports the product development process from the planning phase through product/process validation, flexible and cross industries.

Templates

Creates templates for a project with all objects and for checklists to simplify and standardize the creation of an operational project.

Team Consists of several project participants who play different roles in the development process. A project participant can be an internal employee or an external business partner.

Phase Is a clearly defined period in a project used for structuring the project. Begins with the release and ends with an approval. You assign checklist items and tasks to a phase.

Quality Gates/Milestones Quality gates are planned to achieve a controlled transition between phases and are represented in the application as approvals. To complete a phase, a team of decision-makers must approve it. During the approval, the decision-makers confirm that the goals in a phase, which are needed in the following phase(s), have been achieved. Milestones can be modeled using checklist items or tasks.

Tasks Are used to plan and schedule required processing steps and to assign them to the person responsible. The processing state of a task is documented by a processing status and by reporting actual values. Tasks belong to phases in a project and can be linked to a checklist item. A

task can be relevant to the approval of a phase, that is, the task must be confirmed before the phase can be approved.

Scheduling Calculates the earliest and latest start and end dates of project elements (for checklist items, only end dates). Earliest dates are calculated forwards based on the start date of the project definition. Latest dates are calculated backwards based on the end date of the project definition. Relationships are the basis of scheduling.

Interactive Bar Chart Displays tasks and checklist items as bars or points in time in a calendar diagram, corresponding to their duration and their position in time. Depending on the status of the project, they can be changed in an interactive bar chart.

Checklists Serve as control lists and contain checklist items confirmed by a project participant. Checklist items represent important requirements, which have to be met in order to reach the project goal. Checklist items are relevant to the approval of a phase, that is, a checklist item must be completed before the phase can be approved.

Documents Play an important role in development projects and can be the input or output of a phase. Templates serve as a reference for the creation of new

documents. Documents consist of metadata (for example a short text, the person responsible, and the status), and the document itself (content). Documents can be added to all elements of a development project, except the team. For clarity, documents can be structured within folders.

Object Links Are used to link an existing business object (for example, customer inquiry, specification, bill of material, work breakdown structure, inspection plan, and so on) to a project element. Those objects document the development process and grant access to information about product development. The interface for object links makes it possible to link business objects of different origin to a project and to display the data of these objects in the application or include it in project evaluations. These objects can be located in different systems. In addition to the system on which cProjects runs, these systems can be other SAP systems (for example, SAP Customer Relationship Management online), as well as third-party provider systems or even office-based solutions (for example, a Microsoft Access database).

Confirmations Are used to document a completed task. Before a checklist item can be marked as completed, all related tasks must be confirmed. Dependencies between the phase and the tasks exist and can take different forms. For example, a phase can only be approved if all tasks relevant to the approval of this phase have been completed. After a phase has been approved, the confirmation of the tasks relevant to the approval of this phase can no longer be changed.

Approval and Digital Signature

An approval is a part of a phase in a development project. During an approval, decision-makers document that the goals in a phase, which are needed in the following phase(s), have been achieved. An approval is like a mutual contract and refers to a clearly defined processing state. The system takes this into account by creating an approval document (PDF file) and by protecting the phase from subsequent modifications ("freeze"). The approval document that the system creates is accepted as an official document and contains all the information relevant to the approval. All decision-makers involved in the approval sign this document with a digital signature. By doing so, they grant or reject their individual approval. A phase can only be approved if the signatures of all assigned decision-makers have been given.

Control Plan You can maintain a control plan according to the APQP methodology.